‘Yours Sincerely, Kanan Gill’ tickles as the stand-up comic’s note to future self addresses mental health
Spoilers for ‘Yours Sincerely, Kanan Gill’
“I found a letter that I had written to myself when I was fifteen,” says Kanan Gill, explaining the concept of his new stand-up special, “with a list of goals and things I had to accomplish by now, that I am a different age.”
Gill’s comedy has grown since he first came to prominence in 2014 with his YouTube show ‘Pretentious Movie Reviews’, where he and comic Biswa Kalyan Rath would pick apart trashy cinema. His 2017 comedy special on Amazon Prime Video, ‘Keep It Real’, was light, relatable, and above all, funny, as he spoke about his parents, anecdotes from his life, and his story about “drug use” -- menstrual cramp medication. It was a loose set that guaranteed laughs (thanks to his delivery) even though it lacked what you might expect in form and structure.
In that respect, ‘Yours Sincerely, Kanan Gill’ offers much more. Through a letter addressed to “Kanan Gill (Future)”, the comic examines Indianisms that attack the funny bone, not just because of its relatability, but also because of how ridiculous they are in retrospect. An example of which are PJs, not pajamas but “poor jokes”. Or the very very Indian concept of “timepass”, which is both, an activity and the review of an activity.
The letter details goals his younger self had assigned for him, and as he reads (in a voice that sounds like a very bad impression of Morty from ‘Rick and Morty’) the list of goals that include “focus on your health” and “focus on your education”, Gill digresses into anecdotes and observations. One particularly hilarious bit is his experience with a doctor when he went for a check-up. Gill’s narration of the incident that involved a doctor asking him to place his testicles in his palm is a master class in delivery. Testicular humor is and always will be funny. But how he tells the story adds several dimensions to it.
His set is full of callbacks, a tricky thing that can easily be overdone even without intention, ending up in a joke losing its initial charm. But Gill’s callbacks, plentiful as they were, somehow defied the Law Of Diminishing Marginal Utility. From occasional references to “timepass” to the Pavlovian notification tone of a hydration app to hernia jokes, Gill’s callbacks keep on giving.
With a surprising number of English lessons, jokes about his school band, references to ‘Fight Club’ and ‘Grand Theft Auto’ and his set about the list of goals he had assigned his adult self, Gill does a sort of Bo Burnham and suddenly gets real. He talks about suicidal tendencies and depression. He doesn’t offer any path-breaking breakthroughs, he just talks. And, in between, makes you laugh.
And by the end, you are left with a strange feeling. It’s not as if you’ve learned anything new. By his own account, this is a show where we’d leave with less information than we had when we entered. But we feel oddly comforted by another aspect of relatability -- knowing that the lack of mental health, like the air we breathe, is an experience we share.
Gill’s new special maintains the tone and tenor of his first one. But it feels more endearing. Perhaps, it’s the structure provided by the old letter. Perhaps, it’s the opportunistic digressions. Perhaps, it’s the classic Indianisms. Whatever it is, it’s a good watch.
‘Yours Sincerely, Kanan Gill’ arrives on Netflix on April 24.
